


Search results don't help

by issen4



Category: HIStory3 - 圈套 | HIStory3: Trap
Genre: Gen, M/M, Moral Dilemmas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-22
Updated: 2019-05-22
Packaged: 2020-03-09 17:22:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18921592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/issen4/pseuds/issen4
Summary: Zhao Zi, on Jack's kiss in episode 13.





	Search results don't help

Staring at his computer screen, Zhao Zi came to the realisation that he had dismissed the usefulness of Ah Fei's explanation too quickly. After all, if Ah Fei was the one who confessed to Tang Yi, then it meant that Tang Yi was the recipient of that confession. 

Just like Zhao Zi.

So the person he should be seeking advice from was Tang Yi, right? Except not. His reasoning met a roadblock there. Even after witnessing him kiss Ah Fei, Zhao Zi was just not prepared to see Tang Yi as a casual conversation partner, especially for something like this. Tang Yi was this tall, intimidating gang leader with, as Ah Fei used to put it, a deadened, unfeeling expression at all times.

Or the tall, intimidating gang leader that Ah Fei had been following for four years. Huh. That explained a lot, actually.

It didn't explain Jack, however. Xing Tian Meng had so many men and bodyguards that it was hard to keep track of the ones that were specifically in Tang Yi's entourage, and anyway that was more Ah Fei's thing than Zhao Zi's, so Zhao Zi could say that he had never really noticed Jack before (except maybe as names on Ah Fei's list of Tang Yi's bodyguards) until the day the man kidnapped him and locked him inside a room in Tang Yi's mansion for a whole night.

Except the man then fed him, then teased him, then released him.

Jack had cooked for him again, later. Zhao Zi hadn't had anyone really cook for him after his grandma died. Sure, the team came over sometimes, but usually with takeout that they simply heated up, not actual cooking. He liked that, and he had felt comforted that Jack seemed to appreciate his grandma's wisdom too.

Even with that, it was confusing that Jack could just come right out and say that he was attracted to Zhao Zi, and then crowd Zhao Zi against the wall and kiss him. Didn't something like that call for spending more time together first? They barely knew each other. And not to forget, Jack was a gangster. It seemed like Ah Fei was ignoring that, with his kissing of Tang Yi, but Zhao Zi couldn't, despite Jack's strange line about Zhao Zi believing in him.

And that was Zhao Zi's first kiss! He sat upright at the realisation, then deflated after a few seconds. So what? It wasn't like he'd ever attached much significance to being kissed, just like he hadn't cared much about being a virgin. There was too much going in the world, not to mention their line of work, to be fixated on a few instances of bodily contact.

All the same, it was alarming. Jack was so friendly and caring that half the time, Zhao Zi forgot that he was a gangster, because he always seem so happy to see Zhao Zi and was always looking at Zhao Zi, and he had a nice body too-

See? It was even more alarming now. Zhao Zi bit his lip, remembering the time they both fell into the swimming pool. Since he found Jack's muscles to be so nice, shouldn't he be the one to confess to Jack that he liked him? But Jack said it to him instead, then kissed him. Zhao Zi had been too shocked to react to the kiss, but he could recall it in detail: the way Jack had stood so close, and the way his lips were pressed against Zhao Zi's. It wasn't anything more than a few seconds of lip contact, to be frank, but it was turning Zhao Zi's mind upside down. 

"What are you muttering about?" Yu Chi asked, from the workstation at his left. She leant over to peek at his monitor, eyes widening at the page still showing the search results. 

"Hey, that's private!" he protested, closing the page.

"'What to do when you're a man and a man confesses his love?'" she echoed aloud, and a couple other heads nearby glanced up in frankly prurient curiosity.

"Keep that down," he said to her.

"Sorry," she whispered. "Is it about-" her face grew awkward for a moment, "-Senior and Tang Yi?" 

"Um, sort of," he lied. She didn't know about Jack, of course. 

"Oh." She turned back to her workstation, looking a bit sad. 

Both of them were maintaining a studied silence on _that_. For Yu Chi, Zhao Zi guessed it was because she had a soft spot for Ah Fei, while for Zhao Zi, Ah Fei was his partner and you didn't rat out your partner. That impasse was fine for the short term, but inwardly Zhao Zi was frantically wondering what to do next. For all that Xing Tian Meng was breaking off its ties with the underground, there was still plenty that was, if not precisely dark, at least fairly grey, in the organisation. After all, Xing Tian Meng had been a powerful gang that had controlled large swathes of Taipei and other parts of Taiwan. You couldn't whitewash the past that easily.

There was Wang Kun Cheng's murder, which everyone seemed to have forgotten, but it was still an open file. Ah Fei was certain that Tang Yi didn't do it, but his judgment was suspect, to say the least. Even if it were not Tang Yi himself (probably not, Zhao Zi privately acknowledged), who was to say that Tang Yi hadn't ordered his men to do the deed, or somehow manipulated things to cause Wang Kun Cheng's death? Sure, the man was a drug dealer who deserved worse than death, but his fate was not for Tang Yi to decide.

And now Chen Wen Hao had come into the picture, which seemed to be something Tang Yi had planned for, if the rumours about him meeting Chen Wen Hao privately was true. Zhao Zi wondered what Ah Fei made of that: the report was in the documents that he had sent Ah Fei.

Ah Fei hadn't expressed any more concerns about Wang Kun Cheng's death, nor about Tang Yi's role as the leader of Xing Tian Meng. He was even the one who confessed his feelings to Tang Yi first!

Even with that kiss in the hospital, Zhao Zi couldn't see it ending well for them, unless Ah Fei left the force, and there was all kinds of wrong with that. He wondered if Ah Fei had even thought about it. After all, they'd all seen _Infernal Affairs_ too, and that did not end well.

What did that mean for him and Jack? The whole thing still felt unbelievable to Zhao Zi. Even if he accepted that he did like the other man and wanted to reciprocate, what was Zhao Zi going to do with Jack's role as a gang member – as Tang Yi's right-hand man, no less? He wished acutely that his grandma was still alive.

**Author's Note:**

> I can't help thinking that while Zhao Zi is more naïve, it doesn't mean he's simple. (He did make it though police academy, after all.) There are things that bother him about the kiss - other than having a man confess to you, that is.


End file.
